Always and Forever Read online

  “Do we have the money?” Hannah asked doubtfully.

  “Isaac has sent us the tickets. We will work hard in America and pay him back.”

  All at once Hannah and Dora were plying their father with questions. The kitchen was charged with excitement. Sophie saw the glint of hope in her mother’s eyes. Would the doctors in America help her?

  The next morning Sophie waited until Hannah and Dora had left for their jobs to talk to her father.

  “We have little time for talk, Sophie,” he warned in high spirits. “We must prepare for our journey.”

  “Papa, I would like to stay here. I—” She hoped she could make him understand about Alex. But her father would hear none of it.

  “You’ll go to America with the family,” he barked at her. “Always, you have crazy ideas.”

  “But Papa, I have to tell you—”

  “I will tell you!” he thundered. “You will go with the family to America. Who else speaks the language there? You will lead us. Where Mama and I go, our children go.”

  “Papa, there is a young man,” she said desperately. “He wishes to marry me.”

  “You have been carrying on behind our backs?” he demanded, all at once ashen.

  “Papa, no!”

  “Who is this man who talked to a child about marriage?”

  “I’m fifteen. Mama was fifteen when she married you. We—”

  “Enough of this. It would break your mother’s heart to leave you behind. You have an obligation to take care of the flat and of Mama,” he blustered. “You will go with us to America.”

  Later she sat with Alex at their favorite sidewalk cafe and told him her father’s ultimatum. She fought against tears. How could her whole world have fallen about her shoulders this way? Yet she knew she could not refuse to go with her family. Mama needed her. In a strange new world they would all need her.

  “Sophie, this is insane.” Alex reached across the table for her hand. “You will marry me and stay in Berlin,” he said determinedly. “We have a right to our own lives.”

  “I have to go with them, Alex.” Gently she withdrew her hand. “Our time will come later.” She tried to smile. “I’ll come back to you.” She reached within the neckline of her dress to unpin the jeweled brooch she always wore hidden from all eyes. “I will come back, Alex, and you will give me my pin again. Keep it safe for me. I will come back to you.” Sophie pulled herself back into the present. She had never been able to go back to Alex. Their time had never come.

  Downstairs Kathy walked into the cluttered candy store. Assailed by the familiar aromas of chocolate, soda flavorings, and newsprint, she felt an unexpected emotional wrench. She wouldn’t see Mom and Dad and Aunt Sophie for almost half a year.

  “Bubbeleb—” Her mother emerged from behind the counter with arms outstretched, her eyes moist.

  “Mom, just think I’m going to the Catskills to work for the summer,” Kathy coaxed. The year between Erasmus and Barnard she had been a waitress at Grossinger’s for the summer. Mom and Dad hadn’t minded that, though their phone bill for that eight weeks was frightfully high. Still, in an emergency they could drive up in two hours.

  “You’re going to a foreign country,” her mother reminded dramatically. “Germany yet.”

  “I’ll make you an egg cream for the road.” Her father strived for nonchalance. “You, too, Marge.”

  “A little one,” Kathy stipulated and Marge nodded.

  “You still have your job at Macy’s?” Mrs. Ross asked Marge with sudden concern.

  “Oh, sure.” Marge smiled. She knew Kathy’s mother kept predicting women would be losing their jobs now that the soldiers were all coming home from overseas. “I called in sick. Even a trainee can be sick,” she drawled. At first enthusiastic about the job that could lead up to being a buyer, Marge was talking privately about quitting to look for something on Seventh Avenue, at the wholesale level.

  “Don’t be sick too often,” Mrs. Ross exhorted.

  “My wife still lives in the Depression,” her husband chuckled. “So Marge calls in sick. Girls aren’t standing in line waiting to grab her job. These are good times.”

  “Your ship doesn’t sail till midnight,” Mrs. Ross turned to Kathy accusingly. “So why do you have to leave early in the afternoon?”

  “We’re having a meeting up near the campus,” Kathy fabricated. Mom would feel better if she had to go into the city early. In truth, she wanted to roam about Times Square for a nostalgic while with Marge. Then they were going to splurge on an early dinner at Lindy’s. It would be her big farewell to the city.

  “We should get moving,” Marge said and drained the last of her egg cream in noisy appreciation. “It gets harder and harder to find a place to park in the city.”

  “Drive carefully,” Mr. Ross told Marge when Kathy had exchanged warm embraces with her mother and then himself. Kathy suspected he didn’t trust any woman driver. “Crazy drivers on the road these days,” he’d always say.

  “Kathy, you write home regularly,” her mother ordered and Kathy steeled herself to smile in the face of a possible emotional outpouring.

  “I’ll write twice a week,” she promised. “And I’ll be fine.”

  “I won’t have a moment of real peace until you come home,” her mother declared. “Not a night that I won’t lie awake worrying about you.”

  “The war’s over,” Mr. Ross reminded his wife. “Kathy’ll be safe.”

  “I’m glad Aunt Sophie made me learn German through the years,” said Kathy. “At least, I’ll be able to communicate with the people.” But she was somber as she remembered that a long-time neighbor had given her the names of family members who had been caught in Hamburg during the Nazi rule in hopes she might look them up. But it was unlikely that she could track them down.

  Seated on the front seat of the 1937 Chevy beside Marge, her luggage stashed in the trunk, Kathy considered what lay ahead. It would not be a joyous adventure. She and her group would see what had shocked the world when Allied soldiers had liberated the concentration camps. She suspected how they would react to the kind of atrocities that were difficult to conceive but had been documented by photographs and news stories flashed around the world.

  Mom wanted her to stay home, meet a nice man, and get married. Couldn’t Mom understand that after what had happened in the last few years she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t make an effort, however small, to help the world recover from World War II?

  “Kathy,” Marge began as she pulled away from the curb and joined the stream of traffic down Thirteenth Avenue, “how many doctors did you say were in the group?”

  “Two,” Kathy reported. “The other ten of us are what my English teacher would have called a motley crew. Including a plumber, a psychiatric social worker, and a third-year law student.”

  “And all of you under thirty,” Marge drawled knowingly. “Don’t tell me there won’t be a lot of partying aboard that ship.”

  “There won’t be any partying in Hamburg,” Kathy said with conviction. “I hear the city was one of the worst hit in Europe. And we’re traveling with hordes of canned goods because food is hard to come by.”

  “Two doctors,” Marge repeated. Her smile blissful. “And one of them, I gather from what you told me, is the smoldering, moody type. Like Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights.”

  “No,” Kathy denied. All at once self-conscious.

  Marge clucked in reproach. “What did you say his name was?”

  “I forget,” Kathy lied.

  She had never compared David Kohn to Laurence Olivier, she told herself defensively. She and Marge had had such mad crushes on Olivier their last year at Erasmus. But all at once she recalled David Kohn’s brooding good looks. There was a kind of resemblance between him and the famous actor.

  Chapter 2

  AS THE COMMUTER TRAIN from Greenwich chugged into the depths of Grand Central Station, David Kohn reached for the two much-scarred leather valises that
had traveled with him from Berlin ten years ago, when his parents had packed him off to school in New York. It was still possible then to send money out of Germany for educational purposes. He could hear his father’s voice:

  “You’ll be far away from home, David; but you won’t be alone. My cousin Julius will watch over you. You’ll go to school with his son Phillip. You’ll be with family—and you’ll be safe from this curse that has come over us here in Germany.”

  He hadn’t been back to Europe since the summer of 1937, when, according to his father’s instructions, he visited Salzburg. Was he making a mistake in returning to Germany, even for a few months? Could he handle it?

  All these years later he felt sick when he remembered that strange meeting with Papa on the bridge that connected Salzburg with Germany. The Nazis had allowed Papa to continue operating his private hospital and research center—which had been his father’s before him—because of the important work on nutrition he was doing in his laboratory. A special ruling afforded him the privilege. By then, Jews had been deprived of almost all their rights. Papa had gone to Munich to deliver a paper on this research, and from there had traveled to the bridge. David broke into a cold sweat as he remembered that meeting….

  His eyes crept constantly to his watch because the timing of this meeting was crucial. Papa had insisted that it was too dangerous for him to travel through Germany under present conditions. Instead, he had gone from London to Prague and then to Salzburg.

  His gaze clung to the face of his watch as the time of the meeting approached. His heart pounded. Now, he exhorted himself. Now was the time. Walk toward the bridge. Appear to be a tourist. The Nazi frontier guards at the barbed wire must not realize he and Papa knew each other.

  There he was. How much older his father looked in the two years since they had seen each other! Papa said it was impossible to send money out of Germany anymore. This was the only way to give him funds to continue on through college and into medical school. There had never been any question in either of their minds but that he would become a doctor like his father and grandfather.

  “David, you’re taller,” his father whispered as they met at the barbed wire. The Nazi guard fortunately engaged in conversation with another guard.

  “Just filling out, Papa.” His eyes clung to his father’s face. “How is Mama?” Why hadn’t she come with Papa? “And my sisters? And Grandma and Grandpa?” His words tumbling over each other in his haste to communicate. Knowing this meeting must be brief.

  “Take this,” his father ordered, eyes fastened on the guards, and thrust a small cloth bag through the barbed-wire fence. “Hide it quickly.”

  “Yes, Papa.” He took the bag and thrust it into his pocket.

  “Don’t lose it, David.”

  “The family?” David asked urgently.

  His father’s face was anguished.

  “David, I know no easy way to tell you. Mama died five weeks ago. Her last words were of you.”

  David stared at his father, trying to assimilate what had been told to him.

  “Why didn’t you bring me home?” he reproached with a mixture of grief and anger. “I should have been with her!”

  “Mama insisted—” his father began, then suddenly straightened up and became a stranger. “I am sorry, young man. I can’t give you a cigarette—I don’t smoke.”

  “Move along,” the Nazi guard ordered ominously. “Before I decide to search you. Are you transmitting money into Austria?” he demanded in sudden suspicion.

  “Who has money?” Dr. Kohn shrugged with a touch of humor, avoiding a backward glance as David moved away. “Everything costs so much today—”

  Later he understood that Papa had sold off what the Nazis allowed him to keep and bought diamonds with the money. Diamonds were small and easy to transport. His father knew his cousin Julius would be able to find a buyer for the gems in New York. It was these diamonds, his family’s life savings, that would see him through college and medical school.

  David had never seen his father again. The entire family had died in Bergen-Belsen. He felt again the awful pain when word had come through to him of their deaths in the gas chamber. A former patient of his father—a man who had survived Bergen-Belsen—had contacted him through one of the relief agencies just four months ago. Even while he had hoped for their survival, in his heart he had known they were gone.

  The train pulled to a stop. Passengers were moving toward the exits. David waited for the others to leave. Though the limp he had acquired in a skiing accident at fifteen was barely perceptible—but sufficient to prevent his joining the American armed forces—David was ever conscious of this imperfection.

  He had gone up to Greenwich for two days before sailing for Hamburg out of respect for Uncle Julius and Aunt Bella; they were actually his cousins, but he had been told to regard them as his uncle and aunt. School holidays and summer vacations had been spent with them and their son and daughters. At boarding school he had shared a room with his cousin Phil. He had needed that sense of closeness these years away from home.

  He was never entirely comfortable in their ornate Greenwich mansion. Uncle Julius’ taste was flamboyant compared to that of his parents. True, the Julius Kohn estate—as Uncle Julius enjoyed calling it—was only minutes from the Merritt Parkway in Round Hill, the posh back-country of Greenwich, and marvelously peaceful after his back-breaking tours of duty first as an intern, then resident at Bellevue Hospital. Julius Kohn was recognized as one of the most successful furriers in America, yet David suspected that to his neighbors he was an outsider. David doubted that any Jew—no matter how wealthy—would be anything but an outsider in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Emerging in the central area of the terminal, a valise in each hand, David paused. He had hours on his hands before boarding the ship. He would call Phil to see if he was at that little apartment he had rented for himself up on West End Avenue. Maybe they could have dinner together. Aunt Bella was upset that Phil had insisted on having a place in town for himself, but David understood. After two years fighting a war, Phil wasn’t ready to settle down in Greenwich and go into the fur business with his father.

  Phil answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Hello.” He sounded cautious. Expecting a reproachful call from his mother, David guessed.

  “Hi, it’s me,” David said. “I’ve got some time on my hands before the ship sails. Feel like coming downtown for dinner?”

  “Sure. Where are you?”

  “Grand Central. Where should I—”

  “I’ll pick you up at the Information Center,” Phil interrupted ebulliently. “It’s past the rush hour—I can be there in five minutes.”

  They went to dinner at Toots Shor’s. Phil was restless, talking about trying to line up a job as a roving photographer.

  “The old man’s still on the kick about my coming into the business.” He shuddered expressively. “Climbing into the limo with him every morning at five forty-five for the miserable drive into the city. When I got out of uniform, I swore I’d never get up before nine again.”

  “You’re just out of uniform a few weeks,” David said soothingly. “He knows you need some time to adjust to civilian life again.” He felt guilty that he had never served his adopted country. He was a citizen now. He’d applied for citizenship on his 21st birthday. “Thank God for V-J Day.”

  “You bet.” Phil grinned. “Two years in Europe and they had me out in Texas training for the Pacific. I got rescued just before I was to be shipped out again.” He was pensive for a moment. “You might just see me in Hamburg. I’ve got something going with a magazine. A possible photo layout on postwar Germany.”

  “Great,” David approved. The last few days he’d been having reservations about setting foot on German soil again, yet his conscience told him that as a survivor, it was his personal obligation to help those displaced persons in such need. And he had to see for himself the concentration camp where his family had died. Bergen-Belsen
was close enough to Hamburg for him to be able to drive there in, perhaps, an hour—provided car and gas were available. Aunt Bella said it was masochistic, but he had to know what they had endured.

  “I’d kind of like to see Paris again.” Phil intruded on his introspection. “Some of those babes over there, zowie!” He whistled in appreciation. “And didn’t they just love American GIs.”

  David glanced at his watch. He was hardly in the mood, he thought somberly, to be concerned about girls. This was not a vacation in Europe; there was much work to be done.

  “Maybe I ought to head for the pier. The traffic can be heavy—I wouldn’t want to miss the sailing.”

  Kathy stood on the deck of the ship with Rhoda Karsh—fresh out of Teachers College at Columbia but in no rush to start her teaching career—and watched the lighted torch of the Statue of Liberty disappear from view.

  “My father said he didn’t believe the war was truly over until he saw the torch lighted again,” Kathy said softly.

  “When I was about ten, my parents took me out to Bedloe’s Island to see the Statue of Liberty,” Rhoda remembered. “To them it was holy. They came here as kids early in the century. On the same boat, would you believe it? Of course, they didn’t find that out until they were married.”

  “My Aunt Sophie was sixteen when her family came here from Berlin. She never talks about it, but she worries about cousins that stayed behind in Germany. She hasn’t heard from them in over fifty years—you know how people lose touch. It would be impossible to track them down even if they survived.”

  “This must be a kind of pilgrimage for David Kohn,” Rhoda said, her voice deepening in compassion. “Somebody said his whole family died in the camps.”

  “How awful for him.” She felt a sudden chill, just hearing about it. “I don’t think I could go back if something like that had happened to me.”

  “Wouldn’t you think we could have gotten passage on something better than this heap?” Rhoda deliberately redirected the conversation. Soon enough, Kathy thought, they’d come face to face with the atrocities of the camps. “I didn’t expect the Ile de France, but this is for the birds. Four of us stuffed in a cabin big enough for one!”